Coming Clean - by Eric Heinze (Paperback)

About the Book

"Coming Clean shows how the left can regain power and influence by reckoning with its own past, warts and all, and applying the tools of critical theory to itself as well as to others"--

Book Synopsis

What has gone wrong with the left--and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds.

Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its "wokeness."

In Coming Clean, Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left's own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century--Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of "hatred," and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground.

Review Quotes

"Eric Heinze is a brilliant, multilingual legal philosopher. His plea for leftist autocritique draws on important historical and contemporary examples, and is enlivened by literary references. A pleasure to read."
--Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, author of In Defense of Universal Human Rights

"Eric Heinze has written a novel, sober, and dispassionate account of the politics of memory as variously practiced by left and right. Coming Clean is an ethical intervention in a discourse heavy with moralizing prejudice."
--Anthony Julius, Deputy Chairman, Mishcon de Reya LLP; Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London

"In Coming Clean, Heinze argues that progressives, always quick to sniff out injustice perpetrated by the right, must turn their critical gaze on themselves. The book offers a necessary corrective to our poisoned politics of historical memory."
--Abby Smith Rumsey, author of Memory, Edited

"An iconoclastic must-read for progressives (whatever that loaded term means!). A mirror proffered, rather than held up, to the left-the first, rather than last, word in an essential debate."
--Paul Kohler, MP; Member of the Home Affairs Select Committee of the UK House of Commons

"Eric Heinze can tolerate naivety and hypocrisy within the left, acknowledging many on the political right share these characteristics. He can even put up with in-group bias. But what really gets on his wick is a lack of intellectual curiosity; an aversion to self-criticism. 'Progressive' critical theorists--or crits--imagine themselves to be on the side of the angels. Heinze is out to burst their bubble. Clear-sighted and timely, Coming Clean helps to explain some of today's weird alliances between leftist activists and antidemocratic forces."
--Joe Humphreys, Irish Times

About the Author

Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything (MIT Press), among other books, and has published over 100 articles and has been featured in radio and television and other media around the world.